I cook because going to a restaurant is prohibitively expensive to do every day. Raw ingredients in Norway are already expensive. Most folks cook because they have few decent choices and like the past, they take shortcuts when they can.
At one time, yes, women did most cooking, to a point and dependent on where one lived. Kitchens were dangerous for not only you, but your neighbor too - if you lived in a city. Which meant that if you lived in a city, you bought bread because you were very unlikely to have a place to bake it. You might not have a kitchen at all - most folks living in Roman cities just didn't and purchased food elsewhere.
You might not even know how to make bread, being a woman in the past. Professional cooks and bakers were often men.
If the OP was eating horribly tasting brussel sprouts as a child, it is fair to say that one of the parents were doing the cooking and that they probably were lousy cooks. I don't think anybody would go out to purchase boiled brussel sprouts in the streets to feed their kids. But I might be wrong.
> At one time, yes, women did most cooking
In all of history until very recently. Still in most of the world. Especially in rural areas.
> I cook because going to a restaurant is prohibitively expensive to do every day.
Norway is notorious for this, yes. But still, just because you make food at home doesn't mean that you cook. (Not meaning you personally) People can make sandwiches, as you might know. I had several Norwegian friends who were sustaining themselves on sandwiches exclusively. An impressive feat, considering that bread in Norwegian supermarkets is probably the lowest quality bread in the world.
There's also a generation of old men who are lost between the old and the new world. Many of them being without a woman to cook and too stubborn to learn any cooking of their own, while at the same time not accepting to pay for their food in a restaurant or eatery, because that's "too fancy" and "too expensive", they instead sustain on canned fish and sandwiches made with the worst industrial processed ingredients they can find in a supermarket.
At one time, yes, women did most cooking, to a point and dependent on where one lived. Kitchens were dangerous for not only you, but your neighbor too - if you lived in a city. Which meant that if you lived in a city, you bought bread because you were very unlikely to have a place to bake it. You might not have a kitchen at all - most folks living in Roman cities just didn't and purchased food elsewhere.
You might not even know how to make bread, being a woman in the past. Professional cooks and bakers were often men.